


look me in the eyes (tell me what you see)

by sparkling_cider



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Drama, Gen, i guess, introspective, shit no one is gonna read this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-26
Updated: 2019-03-26
Packaged: 2019-12-18 03:24:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18241394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sparkling_cider/pseuds/sparkling_cider
Summary: Disclaimer: I don’t hate Peggy.I love Peggy! I think she’s great. But I also think that fandom has a habit of treating her like some kind of perfect goddess angel and forgetting that the organization that she co-founded was infiltrated by literal Nazis for like seventy years and she had no idea.So here is an older Peggy thinking about that for a little while.





	look me in the eyes (tell me what you see)

There was a moment.

She remembers it clear as day—clearer, even, because her eyes are slowly failing now and time blends together outside the window of her nursing home. Day and night and summer and winter are all one and the same. Peggy drifts in and out of half-forgotten memories consciousness, lost in the maze that she spent so long constructing in her mind.

Today is a good day. She sits up in bed and watches the news and imagines being the kind of woman who flinches at the way the helicarriers crash. At the long list of dead and longer of missing that scrolls across the screen. At the destruction that she could have prevented.

There was a moment.

That is a lie, of course: there were many moments. Many people in places they had no business even knowing about, documents disappearing from safes, and secrets that one too many agents knew about. There have been dozens of times when she could have spoken up, investigated, made a difference. But one of them has stuck with her, crystalized in a mind that's so full of fog.

She was thirty, give or take a year. Young, but not inexperienced. Old enough to know that it was not a question of if but of when she would start making waves. Waiting for a lucky break as she rose slowly but surely in the ranks of the SSR, building the reputation of a competent field agent. Peggy Carter in the early 1950s was a woman deserving of respect, but not yet of fear. That would come later.

It was night when it happened, one of those stupidly humid East Coast evenings that faded into a muggy not-quite darkness. The office where she was stationed on a break between missions didn't have air conditioning, which meant that she had to keep wiping her brow with a tissue and that her hands left sweat stains on the paperwork. She was just finishing up with a report, and although it was closer to sunrise than sunset it was par for the course for her in those days.

Work twice as hard and be thought half as good, Peggy had read in an article a few days before. She wasn't sure who had said it; some politician from Canada, maybe. A woman.

When the door to the office slid quietly open, Peggy stopped writing and reached for her gun in the same motion. Before the person on the other side had had a chance to move, she was standing beside the door, gun cocked and finger on the trigger. There was sensitive information here, lack of air conditioning aside. Intruders were not tolerated in the US Army.

But the man who poked his head carefully in wasn't a Russian spy or a Korean infiltrator. Peggy knew him, a little: his name was Lewis Murrin, and he was her boss's boss. They'd exchanged pleasantries in hallways, and once she'd given him a mission report directly. She had no idea why he would be sneaking into the office in the middle of the night.

Peggy stopped breathing and prayed that Murrin was too distracted to notice her standing barely a foot away from him with a gun pointed at his head.

Luckily, he walked past her without a second glance. He headed straight for the filing cabinets that lined each wall, seeming to know exactly what he was looking for. Peggy followed him, her footsteps nearly silent on the carpeted floor, and watched. Murrin unlocked the drawer—where had he gotten the key for that?—and pulled out a manila folder. Peggy couldn't read the words printed at the top, but then, she didn't need to. She knew exactly what it said, because she was the one who titled it more than three years ago.

What, Peggy wondered, was Lewis Murrin doing with the only remaining copies of Arnim Zola's notes and formulas from his experiments on captured soldiers? It was time to find out.

"What are you doing here?"

To his credit, Murrin didn't jump. He whipped around, and Peggy thought she saw his eyes narrowing as he struggled to identify her. She gave him a moment.

"Carter?" he asked. Not Peggy, not Margaret—Carter. Sometimes she thinks that's why she did what she did. Other times she remember that that's a lie.

"What are you doing here?" she repeated.

Murrin cleared his throat. "I could ask you the same question."

"I don't think you can, actually. I have special permission from Parry to stay late to finish a project. Ask him yourself if you don't believe me."

"I… I believe you."

She kept her gun up. "Then answer the question."

"I can't tell you," Murrin said. "You're smart enough to know that, aren't you? There are… things happening here. Moving parts. Nothing to do with you."

"Things that you need copies of Arnim Zola's formulas for?"

He didn't respond.

Peggy considered her options. Murrin was higher up on the perilous ladder that was the military than she could expect to be in the next five years, optimism aside. She was a woman—a trained, effective woman who consistently outperformed male agents, but a woman nonetheless. Even though she was not the one caught red-handed with files that she shouldn't know the existence of, her position was no more stable than Murrin's when it came down to it. A single word from him, and her career would crash and burn faster than one of Howard Stark's flying cars.

"Looks like we're both trapped, huh?" Murrin said quietly.

Peggy looked at him, considering. He was still nervous, she could tell, but he had regained some semblance of control over the interaction. She still had a gun pointed at him, but they had both realized that she wasn't going to use it.

"Listen," Murrin continued, "how about we both just forget about this? You won't mention that you saw me here, and I—"

"Bill Reynolds," Peggy said. God, but it felt good to interrupt. To track his gaze, wide-eyed again.

"What about him?"

"He's an idiot, and we both know it." She paused again, assessing how much she could get away with. "I could do his job better than he does asleep."

Murrin didn't say anything.

"Give it to me, and I won't talk."

She watched Murrin swallow.

"Yes," he said after a long moment. "That works."

"I'm pleased to hear it."

He nodded at her, and she inclined her head as well, then cocked it as she watched him make his way to the door, bumping into desks and chairs as he went.

Something had happened, she knew, that should not have. A man now possessed information that should have gathered dust in a forgotten cardboard box for the next thousand years. There were, as Murrin had said, things happening. Shadows forming, darkness gathering. She had perhaps passed up on an opportunity to bite in the bud a very large thornbush that could grow to surround her completely.

She would keep an eye on Murrin for now, she decided. And when she left the SSR at last, she would ensure that the organization she had decided to found was clean as a whistle. The SSR could take care of itself. More importantly, she, Peggy Carter, was moving up in the world.

* * *

Here is how Peggy knows she is not a good woman: she does not regret it. She is desperate enough to fall for her own lies about how SHIELD may have done more good than harm at the end of the day. She tells herself that the Avengers have saved more people than the Winter Soldier killed, because the alternative is almost too painful to consider. And yet if she were a good woman she would consider it anyway. That is what goodness is, Peggy decided in 1943 when she watched a man storm a Hydra base wearing tights and armed with a plastic shield.

Goodness is courage to face your fears head on, to tell the truth in a world of lies. Peggy is not good. She is one of the liars.

She did not become a liar in a day; except in storybooks, princes don't turn into beasts in the span of an hour, or even of a day. But if she had to point at a moment when she began the transformation, when she first employed the mantra of  _Not my problem_  that would serve her so well in the coming years—well, she would point to a night that never fully dimmed one New England fall.


End file.
